How to know if someone has read your text

If you’ve sent that important message and want to know if the recipient is taking a long time to respond or just ignoring you, we’ll show you how to find out.

Here’s how to tell if someone has read your message on iOS or Android.

How to know if someone has read your text on Android

In order to know if someone has read a message you sent them, you must have used an internet messaging application to send it, such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger or Apple iMessage.

You can’t tell if someone has read a regular text message (SMS) on Android or iOS.

Internet-based applications send messages over a web connection, as opposed to the mobile network. Being online allows them to come up with send, deliver, and read indicators that will help you know if your message actually reached their phone, and in turn if they actually saw it.

In WhatsApp, for example, one checkmark means your message was sent successfully, two gray checkmarks mean it was delivered to the recipient’s phone, and two blue checkmarks mean they read it. In group messages, the two checkmarks will not appear until all participants have received and read the message.

This applies to read receipts on WhatsApp on iOS as well as Android.

In WhatsApp, you and the recipient must have read receipts turned on in Settings > Privacy. If only one of you does this, both of you will only see double gray checkmarks to indicate that the message has been delivered, but they will never turn blue to indicate that it has been seen.

Facebook Messenger displays the recipient’s profile picture in a small circle below the message to indicate that they have seen it. If they haven’t seen it yet but it was successfully delivered, it will be a blue tick instead.

How to Tell if Someone Read Your Text on iPhone and iMessage

You can tell if your message was sent via iMessage in Apple’s Mail app because it will be blue. If it is green, it is an ordinary text message and does not offer read/delivered receipts. iMessage only works when you send messages to other iPhone users using the Messages app.

Even then, you’ll only see that they’ve read your message if they’ve enabled the “Send read receipts” option in Settings > Messages.

If they’ve enabled the Send read receipts option, you’ll be able to see that they’ve read your message right below the message itself. It will say “Read”, then the date (the day if it was in the last week or the time if it was today) that they read it.